To the Editor:
Correction to my statement to the city council on December 14, 2009: The owner of the Fillmore Gazette did not say that I had a favorite abortion clinic; my apologies to him and the council members. With that exception, however, I stand behind my statement in its entirety.
Sincerely,
Bob Stroh

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To the Editor:
To Stop the Confusion
I am disturbed over some recent events involving one persons campaign for Sheriff of Ventura County. Dennis Carpenter has kicked off his campaign going by the name of "Carp".
Anybody that has lived in the county for more than 10 years may remember the REAL Carp, aka Larry Carpenter. He's had that nickname since high school. Any fact checkers can take a look a Fillmore High Schools 1964 yearbook, and see that's it's true. His official signature is Carp and has been for many years. That can also be checked by looking at his drivers license, or the many documents signed by him throughout his years as Sheriff of Ventura County. His logo has also been to have "Carp" in cursive over the Sheriff's badge. Guess who also decided to adopt that for his logo.
Several times a week my Father is approached by people asking him if he is part of Dennis Carpenter's campaign. I'm writing this to set the record straight, and to stop the confusion.
NO my Dad is not running for Sheriff. Been there done that.
NO, Dennis Carpenter is NOT a relative.
My Dad is NOT involved in nor does he support Dennis Carpenter's campaign.
My Dad had not yet publicly endorsed any candidate for Sheriff.
There's is only one Sheriff Carp, and that's my Dad, Larry Carpenter.
You may have heard the term "bait and switch"...... well, don't get hooked.
Margo Carpenter,
Daughter of Larry "Carp" Carpenter

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To the Editor:
In a December 10 letter, ashamed FUSD employee took me to task for not citing a Stanford CREDO report on charter schools in greater detail. This week, ashamed employee says the same Stanford report is fatally flawed and should be ignored. This new attitude is based on what ashamed employee refers to as “the Hoxby report.” There is no Hoxby report. What there is is a memo written by noted charter school advocate Caroline Hoxby.
Ashamed employee refers to this memo as being “from Stanford University.” Caroline Hoxby is an economist at Stanford, but she wrote her memo all by herself. This is in no sense a report from the university.
In contrast, the 2009 Stanford CREDO report, is a peer reviewed study. It was produced by CREDO, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, and is widely considered the best and most detailed study of charter schools ever done.
Hoxby, in her memo, accused the CREDO report of methodological flaws. This critique was answered in detail by the CREDO researchers in a paper called “Fact vs. Fiction: An Analysis of Dr. Hoxby’s Misrepresentation of CREDO’s Research.” They write:
“The memo, “A Serious Statistical Mistake in the CREDO Study of Charter Schools,” by Caroline Hoxby, does not provide any basis whatsoever for discounting the reliability of the CREDO study’s conclusions. The central element of Dr. Hoxby’s critique is a statistical argument that is quite unrelated to the CREDO analysis. The numerical elements of it are misleading in the extreme, even had the supporting logic been correct. Unfortunately, the memo is riddled with serious errors both in the structure of the underlying statistical models and in the derivation of a bias.”
Hoxby is controversial figure in academic circles, and her own work has been criticized for methodological flaws. She was the center of a controversy in 2005, when Professor Jesse Rothstein from Princeton flat out accused her of fudging data in a paper about charter schools.
Ashamed employee suggests that we ignore the Stanford study (which looked at 70% of all charter school students in the United States.) Instead we are referred to a paper on the charter schools of New York City which just coincidentally happens to be co-written by the same Caroline Hoxby. This study itself asks the question, “Is New York City a typical environment for charter schools?” It also answers the question: “Nothing about New York City is typical!”
Ashamed employee wants us to ignore the best and biggest study of charter schools ever conducted, because one controversial professor of economics wrote a memo critical of it, a memo that was systematically refuted by the authors of the report. Instead, we are supposed to extrapolate the results of a study by the same pro charter partisan about New York City’s charter schools, and assume we would get similar results in Piru.
Greg Spaulding

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